Swedish police have authorized a rally on Wednesday outside Stockholm’s largest mosque where an organizer plans to burn a copy of the Koran, on the first day of the most important holiday in the Muslim calendar, Eid al-Adha. “The police authorize the gathering” because “the security risks” linked to burning the Koran “are not such as to prohibit it”, she wrote in her decision consulted by AFP.
The organizer of the rally says he wants to “express (his) opinion about the Koran”
The rally will take place at 1:30 p.m. (11:30 GMT) in front of the Great Mosque of Stockholm, where the police are monitoring the area, noted an AFP journalist. The subject is sensitive in Sweden where a demonstration in January, during which a Koran was burned in front of the Turkish embassy in Stockholm, had aroused the anger of Turkey, which is blocking the candidacy of the Scandinavian country to NATO. In his request for a demonstration consulted by AFP, the organizer of Wednesday’s rally, Salwan Momika, 37, said he wanted to “express (his) opinion about the Koran”. “I will tear up the Koran and burn it,” he wrote.
The holding of two similar gatherings on February 6 and 9, which were to see copies of the holy book of Islam being burned, had been refused by the Stockholm police who had invoked the risk of disturbing public order. The demonstrators appealed the decision and an administrative tribunal ruled in their favor in early April.
In mid-June, the administrative court of appeal confirmed the first instance judgment, indicating that the security risks put forward by the police “did not have a sufficiently clear link” with the gatherings in question. It is on this basis that the Swedish police took their decision on Wednesday, just a few days before the Vilnius summit, on July 11 and 12, where Stockholm hopes for progress for its entry into NATO.